The questionnaires are closed ended and they will be self-administered. The assumption made in this exercise of data collection is that all the respondents-parents of the children are literate. The questions will be simple and short. Presenting the questionnaires in person to the parents and caregivers during social events or annual general meetings will reduce the chances of interviewer bias, make is easy to seek the responses of many people and less time will be utilized on administration.
Sample questionnaires
The questionnaire seeks to find responses regarding the effectiveness of child protection in the Primary schools in the UK and whether the introduction of the Eileen Munro’s Recommendations helped to improve the situation or not. Your cooperation and candidness will be appreciated. All respondents are encouraged to provide truthful responses since the interview will accord each respondent adequate privacy.
Please do not write your name anywhere on this questionnaire
Please all the participants are requested to answers the simple questions based on the context of the questionnaire.
Please write the date of feeling the questionnaire here _________/________/_________
1. Gender of your child? Male/ Female
2. Age of your child?
3. Are you aware of the Eileen Munro’s Recommendations? Yes/No
4. Any suspicion of child maltreatment in school or at home? Yes/No
5. Can you relate mood disorders you recently noticed in your child to child maltreatment? Yes or No
6. Can you relate poor academic performance you recently noticed in your child to child maltreatment? Yes or No”
7. How good was your child for the last one week?
a
Polite?
b
Displayed mood disorders?
c
Aggressive?
d
Exhibited signs of withdrawal from elderly people
The Results
The results from the questionnaire had variant responses based on the questions asked. The interviewers then grouped the answers of both yes and no and used the numerical strength of the answers to determine which one between the yes and no had more responses for each question asked. The two main questions that were much interest to the researcher are whether the parents could relate the poor academic performance of their children to child maltreatment at home or school. The number of people who participated in the interview were 62 but only 50 correctly filled the questionnaire.
Summarizing data: Grouping and Visualizing
The first step to undertake with any data during statistical analysis is to summarise it. That process entails presenting it in a manner that best gives meaning to the data.
The first step requires grouping the data in its raw form into categories and then attempt to visualize it. For instance, the data obtained from the questionnaire administered to the parents and caregivers had the age of the children and academic performance and mood disorders as the variables (Deangelis and Fontanarosa 2010, p.383). Thus, the first thing to do is the grouping of data into categories. The categories, in this case, are based on the age of the children. For the subsequent analysis of the data, the grouping of the age data occurred in the interval of two.
One of the most commonly used techniques of summarizing the data such as the one collected from the questionnaires. Some of the methods include tables, graphs and in particular bar charts that show every data point in details (Hesabi et al. 2015, p.1109).
Another alternative to using a bar chart or line chart is the adoption of the line chart that has several data points then joins them together using a line (Deangelis and Fontanarosa 2010, p.384). The data obtained from the questionnaires was tabulated in the table shown below then the line graph generated based on the results.
Frequency
Child's age group
Poor academic performance F1
Mood disorders F2
3-5
12
7
6-8
8
13
9-11
16
8
12-14
9
14
15-17
5
8
Grand Total
50
50
The hypothetical above table shows the hypothetical data collected from the simulation exercise of the interview conducted on the parents and the caregivers of the children who attended the meeting at school.
The graph below represents the hypothetical data in the table format obtained from the responses of the participants in the questionnaires.
hypothetical data in the table format obtained from the responses of the participants in the questionnaires.
Statistical analysis of the Results
Key
X represents the midpoint of the grouped data of the age groups of the children
F1 represents the frequency that is the number of parents who admitted that child malpractice at school affected the academic performance of their children. F2 represented the frequency of the parents who answered yes when asked whether poor child protection measures at school or even by caregivers at home caused mood disorders among their children.
The independent variable in this case is the age of the child. The variable that the influences the intended outcome of the researcher.
The dependent variable is the poor academic performance and the mood disorders. The two variables change with respect to age.
Discussion
Measures of Location: Averages
The average conveys the information about the size of the impact that the researcher is testing or intends to find out. The main intention in computing the measures of central tendency is that is the median, mean and the mode is to determine how small or large is the data. The computation of the mean for the data collected from the survey is crucial. However, over-reliance on the mean alone is not enough because outliers could skew the data despite the fact that it uses all data points in its calculation. In statistical data, outliers are the data points that are either too small or large in the sample data. Therefore, to give more meaning to the data for interpretation, there is need to use the median to augment the import of the mean. The median depicts the midpoint of the data (Parsons et al. 2012, p.60). The median does not get skewed by extreme values. However, its application for further statistical analysis is limited. The mode represents the most common value in a set of data but also has limited use in statistical analysis (Parsons et al. 2012, p.60). The data had two aspects that needed evaluation that is the students’ performance and the mood disorders of the children. The mean for performance of the students is 9.64 whereas that for the mood disorders is 10.18. The two means are neither too large or small but shows the size of the impact of child maltreatment on the academic performance and mood disorders.
The mean
The standard deviation for the two data sets based on the intended responses were calculated and obtained as follows.
Standard deviation for the dismal academic performance among students is 2.6 while for the mood disorders is 3.95. Ideally, the standard deviation shows how far the collected data can spread farther from the mean. For this case, the values of the standard deviation are smaller indicating that are clustered around the mean. The mean for student performance is 9.64, interpreting this value with the standard deviation, means that the highest number of respondents from parents and caregivers for a particular age of the children would not be so far from 9.64 by a bigger margin.
The above table represents the continuation of data analysis for the measures of spread.
The symbols in the table above shows the different components of the formula used to calculate the variance and the standard deviation.
Variance
In statistical data, variance measures how distributed the numbers are in a given set of data. The variance denotes how far each number in a particular set of data is from the mean (Sarkar and Rashid 2017, p.45). The variances for poor academic performance and mood disorders are 6.77 and 15.63 respectively. Thus, the mean for the data showing a decline in the academic performance of the children denotes that the responses are 6.77 far from the mean which is 9.64. Additionally, the variance of mood disorders is 15.63 far from the mean of 10.83. That implies that the biggest number of the people who responded yes with regards to whether abuse of children leads to poor performance can go as high as twenty.
Conclusion
The paper was produced as part of an extensive project on advancing consequences in the system of child protection, commissioned by Early Intervention Foundation, supported by Local Government Authorities and NSPCC. Furthermore, it is also evidenced in the paper that family is the best place to raise a child as the parents and society provide services the child needs survival.
References
Deangelis, C.D. and Fontanarosa, P.B., 2010. The importance of independent academic statistical analysis. Biostatistics, 11(3), pp.383-384.
Hesabi, Z.R., Tari, Z., Goscinski, A., Fahad, A., Khalil, I. and Queiroz, C., 2015. Data summarization techniques for big data—a survey. In Handbook on Data Centers (pp. 1109-1152). Springer, New York, NY.
Parsons, N.R., Price, C.L., Hiskens, R., Achten, J. and Costa, M.L., 2012. An evaluation of the quality of statistical design and analysis of published medical research: results from a systematic survey of general orthopaedic journals. BMC medical research methodology, 12(1), p.60.
Sarkar, I. and Rashid, M., 2017. Visualizing the Sample Standard Deviation. Educational Research Quarterly, 40(4), p.45.
